The Chukchi Bible

By the celebrated author of A Dream in Polar Fog, a collection of the myths and stories of Yuri Rytkheu’s own family that is at once a moving history of the Chukchi people who inhabit the northern shores of the Bering Sea and a beautiful cautionary tale rife with conflict, human drama, and humor. We meet fantastic characters: Nau, the mother of the human race; Rau, her half-whale husband; and Rytkheu’s own grandfather, fated to be an intrepid traveler, far-ranging whaler, living ethnographic exhibit, and the last shaman of Uelen. The Chukchi Bible moves through vast Arctic tundra, sea, and sky – and to places deep within ourselves—introducing readers, in vivid prose, to an extraordinary mythology and a resilient people.

By the celebrated author of A Dream in Polar Fog, a collection of the myths and stories of Yuri Rytkheu’s own family that is at once a moving history of the Chukchi people who inhabit the northern shores of the Bering Sea and a beautiful cautionary tale rife with conflict, human drama, and humor. We meet fantastic characters: Nau, the mother of the human race; Rau, her half-whale husband; and Rytkheu’s own grandfather, fated to be an intrepid traveler, far-ranging whaler, living ethnographic exhibit, and the last shaman of Uelen. The Chukchi Bible moves through vast Arctic tundra, sea, and sky – and to places deep within ourselves—introducing readers, in vivid prose, to an extraordinary mythology and a resilient people.

Nursed back to health by Arctic aborigines, a Canadian sailor finds his loyalties torn between his new people and the life he left behind—a novel full of “passion, strength, and beauty of a world we . . . have never understood” (Farley Mowat) John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. Having had his hands amputated, crippled with little hope of returning home, the Chukchi community decides to adopt this wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. From thinking of Chukchi as savages, John comes to know his new companions as real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. He begins to understand ehri community, respects them, and makes an effort to be accepted as one of them. Though crippled, John rises to the Chukchi view of a person. But how much longer will John commit to this newfound perspective when presented with the opportunity to return to his own past and family? Rytkheu’s empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world. A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the people of Chukotka, and a politically and emotionally charged adventure story.

Less tangible than melting polar glaciers or the changing social conditions in northern societies, the modern Arctic represented in writings, visual images and films has to a large extent been neglected in scholarship and policy-making. However, the modern Arctic is a not only a natural environment dramatically impacted by human activities. It is also an incongruous amalgamation of exoticized indigenous tradition and a mundane everyday. The chapters in this volume examine the modern Arctic from all these perspectives. They demonstrate to what extent the processes of modernization have changed the discursive signification of the Arctic. They also investigate the extent to which the traditions of heroic Arctic images – whether these traditions are affirmed, contested or repudiated – have continued to shape, influence and inform modern discourses. Sometimes the Arctic is seen as synonymous with modernity itself. Sometimes it appears as a utopian space signalling a different future. However, it still often represents the continued survival within modernity of the past as nostalgia, longing, dream and myth.

Our proper name is as much a part of us as our own skin. It travels with us like a passport, testifying to our unique presence on this earth. The articulation of our name rolls off our tongue with ease and familiarity, yet we rarely turn and examine the part our name plays in what makes us who we are. Our first name reflects the hopes and dreams of our parents and family, our culture, and our own sense of self, while our surname carries our ancestral history, a branding of both affiliation and transmission. In The Power of Names, Mavis Himes explores both the profound ambivalence that many of us feel toward our names and the conscious and unconscious impact our names have on our lives, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. She explores such questions as: What do our names mean? How do they influence our destiny? What does it mean to lose or change our name - and what does this reveal or conceal about who we are? Himes engages readers through a skillful interweaving of reflections on her own Jewish surname, shortened by immigrant ancestors to accommodate a new life in a new world; the historical and cultural impact of a group on naming practices; the various ways different cultures celebrate the naming of infants; the power of names in myth and legend; and the impact of names on friends and patients from her practice. Readers are invited to consider their own names, the names they give others, and the names of those around them as a starting point for understanding the stories of our lives.

This fable of an indigenous Arctic people “offers profound considerations about stewardship of and people’s relationships to the natural world” (Publishers Weekly). Nau cannot remember a time when she was not one with the world around her: with the fast breeze, the green grass, the high clouds, and the endless blue sky above the Shingled Spit. But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, sharing her story of brotherhood between the two species. But as these origins grow distant, the old woman’s tales are subsumed into myth—and her descendants are increasingly bent on parading their dominance over the natural world. Buoyantly translated into English for the first time by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this new entry in the Seedbank series is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi, a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego—and another unforgettable work of fiction from Yuri Rytkheu, “arguably the foremost writer to emerge from the minority peoples of Russia’s far north” (New York Review of Books). “We have so little intimate information about these Arctic people, and the writer’s deep emotional attachment to this landscape of ice (today melting away under global warming forces) makes every sentence seem a poetic revelation.” —Annie Proulx

For readers of Giulia Enders’ Gut and Bill Bryson’s The Body, a surprising, witty and sparkling exploration of the teeming microbiome of possibility in human feces from microbiologist and science journalist Bryn Nelson. The future is sh*t: the literal kind. For most of human history we’ve been, well, disinclined to take a closer look at our body’s natural product—the complex antihero of this story—save for gleaning some prophecy of our own health. But if we were to take more than a passing look at our poop, we would spy a veritable cornucopia of possibilities. We would see potent medicine, sustainable power, and natural fertilizer to restore the world’s depleted lands. We would spy a time capsule of evidence for understanding past lives and murderous ends. We would glimpse effective ways of measuring and improving human health from the cradle to the grave, early warnings of community outbreaks like Covid-19, and new means of identifying environmental harm—and then reversing it. Flush is both an urgent exploration of the world’s single most squandered natural resource, and a cri de coeur (or cri de colon?) for the vast, hidden value in our “waste.” Award-winning journalist and microbiologist Bryn Nelson, PhD, leads readers through the colon and beyond with infectious enthusiasm, helping to usher in a necessary mental shift that could restore our balance with the rest of the planet and save us from ourselves. Unlocking poop’s enormous potential will require us to overcome our shame and disgust and embrace our role as the producers and architects of a more circular economy in which lowly byproducts become our species’ salvation. Locked within you is a medicine cabinet, a biogas pipeline, a glass of drinking water, a mound of fuel briquettes; it’s time to open the doors (carefully!). A dose of medicine, a glass of water, a gallon of rocket fuel, an acre of soil: sometimes hope arrives in surprising packages.

Spanning nine time zones, the Russian Arctic was mostly unexplored before the twentieth century. Paul Josephson describes the massive effort under Stalin to assimilate the Arctic into the Soviet empire--effects still being felt today, as Putin redoubles efforts to secure the Arctic, which he sees as key to Russia's economic and military status.